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I'd like to give Zenimax the benefit of the doubt, but most of the recent big mmos failed to not only live up to their own claims, but felt half finished.

Wasn't there a rant video on this very site talking about not blinding believing what the devs tell us before they actually show their cards?

I want ESO to be a great fun game or I wouldn't bother to post. Maybe its to late. Maybe the development of the game is to far along. Or just maybe these devs have managed to catch lightning in a bottle.

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You often run into 1 of 2 problems. Either the voice over is really generic and overused, or it becomes a bottleneck for development and hampers the quick release of new content.

I would rather see mostly voice overed. Use it for main quest lines and stories. Granted if they can afford to keep content coming with 100% voice over, high quality, and non-repetitve I'm all for it. But if they have to sacrifice any of those things, I'd rather they just trim the amount of VO they do and keep the quality high and content flowing.

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"Voice acting has been a major element of The Elder Scrolls series for quite some time now."

So has the ability to chose and even change your faction at will andhave any race/faction combination, not be locked into closed zones, have content that levels with you so it stays 100% viable and you werent funneled into some far off PvP lands behind an invisible wall that magically kept the enemy from entering your lands even though you are at war.

Sure isnt stopping them from not doing those TES staples and instead spending how many thousands of man hours on voice that should be used to make sure the game has depth, something every single other MMOs with full voiceovers LACKED in.

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I think Zenimax will learn from Bioware's mistakes. Hopefully, they'll make the choices you make actually mean something. In SWTOR it doesn't matter if I kill every NPC, torture every companion, or degrade every superior on my Sith Assassin, cuz "as a Sith, I'm better than everyone" :) The game pretty much played out the same no matter what. One thing I liked in Skyrim, was if you got enough bounty, NPCs would send people after you. I also liked stealing stuff from guards, and trying to not get caught :D

My best hope is that ESO will be a crafting paradise. There hasn't been a great "Crafters' game" in a long time. I can remember in the early years of MMOs, in Ashen Empires mainly. Spending my time in town peddling my wares that I crafted, and leveled up from crafting. I'm a crafter at heart, and it's always one of the things I enjoy most in any MMO I've ever played.

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That also means a lot of development will go into presentation. I hope they are very efficient at vo work and even still only limit vo where it does fit and still develop other aspects of the game as an Mmo. However it being eso, maybe not compromising the single player quality is the most important but also developing the engine to handle Mmo development in the future.

“Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble”

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Originally posted by jtcgs

"Voice acting has been a major element of The Elder Scrolls series for quite some time now."

So has the ability to chose and even change your faction at will andhave any race/faction combination, not be locked into closed zones, have content that levels with you so it stays 100% viable and you werent funneled into some far off PvP lands behind an invisible wall that magically kept the enemy from entering your lands even though you are at war.

Sure isnt stopping them from not doing those TES staples and instead spending how many thousands of man hours on voice that should be used to make sure the game has depth, something every single other MMOs with full voiceovers LACKED in.

You slipped that knife right in between the ribs quite nicely!

While fully voiced games can help with immersion, I'm not sure the expense is worth the trouble it brings. It certainly makes added or changing content way less flexible. Even more so in MMO type games.

If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.

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As a confirmed Altaholic the VO in quests gets old really quickly. Like someone else said, story and lore-mongers will always take the time to read and get involved in what they're doing. After all, Elder Scrolls games have always come with a whole raft of reading material in-game. Most mmo players are just going to skip VO like they do for walls of text. It's a hard one to know what to do to get the balance just right. What Elder Scrolls games have in their favour is that VO quest-givers in previous games have been balanced pretty well, avoiding becoming repetative and siding on the side of just long enough to be deep but not too long to be distracting. Whether the regular MMO junkies see it the same way, we'll have to see.

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Ugh, voice acting. We have movies for that. And any mmo with voice acting very quickly becomes redundant once you reach end game, which generally takes a few months. Then you're stuck hearing the same old crap for years (if you stick around that long).

Plus, as someone else had mentioned, it's a heavy weight on the resourses of the game.

I want to beleive in this game, but really I can see already its going to cater to the noob: i.e handholding, insulting anyone with a brain by using the MMO template of quest markers, and linear "go hear then go there" gameplay.

Gamers usually don't know what they want. What they all secretly desire is a game that isn't pretty much everyone wearing the same gear (with only very minor differences) so that nobody cries during pvp. They don't really want cutscenes or actors or any of that crap. What they really want is tier raiding, to have oportunities to actually advance your character beyond "slightly better" than others so that you can absolutely own people in pvp (because you actually put in time and work to gain the power) and to not see a quest marker for the rest of their lives. In other words: dificulty and complexity, not simplicity and equality, which make for very boring, very marxist style gameplay.

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I agree that some gamers have a hidden desire to return to the days of "difficulty and complexity."

You might want to check out "Camelot Unchained."

It's still just a bunch of concepts, but if it gets funding from Kickstarter next month, it might be the complex, challenging MMO that you're looking for.

Anyways, back to the topic of voice acting in ESO, as long as it doesn't have exorbitant amounts of voice acting like SW:TOR (e.g. a few lines of dialogue per quest, as opposed to several branching options per sentence), it could work fine.

Dealing with choice, from what I've heard, it will utilize "phazing" technology, so if you decide to save a group of people, they will stay saved in your world and might even help you in the future. But if youir friend didn't save them, they wouldn't show up to him.

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As long as the moral choices are more complex than "good, evil, ambiguous", and provided the voice acting is merely there to add flavor and not try to turn most of the game into a goddamned mini-screenplay instead of, a game, I don't see a problem.

If you don’t do stupid things while you’re young, you’ll have nothing to smile about when you’re old.